SQL Server Database Administration

A magical thing happened this week in the SQL Community Slack (it’s free to join, by the way, sign up here). In the midst of a discussion about the cost of attending conferences, Benni De Jagere shared the following tweet from Cathrine Wilhelmsen: Did you know that ALL the session recordings from PASS Summit 2017 (and earlier) are available for free? 🙂 Get your learning on here: https://t.co/zDJ9DAyr1U #SQLPass #PASSsummit #SQLFamily— Cathrine Wilhelmsen (@cathrinew) January 14, 2019 I follow Cathrine, but apparently I need to follow her more closely, as I’d missed this tweet on the 14th. I had no idea these recordings were free and searchable. These free sessions include way more than the Summits I checked out which recordings are available, and my mind was blown — it’s not just past PASS Summit recordings (excluding the 2018 Summit, most of which are not currently free), but also user…

I recently got together with fellow Microsoft Data Platform MVPs Steve Jones, Kathi Kellenberger and Grant Fritchey to discuss the highlights of innovations we’ve seen in 2018 and predictions for 2019. The 63 minute recording is available to watch anytime here.

One of the things that brings Microsoft MVPs together each year is complaining about the pains of reporting community contributions to Microsoft. This is a typical first world problem, but with a history of reporting tools ranging from temperamental Infopath forms to websites where you painstakingly click here and there for hours, there have been reasons for the complaints. This year I decided to try out using PowerShell to add my contributions. This has been available for about a year thanks to François-Xavier Cat and a few friends, but I’d completely forgotten that it was possible until William Durkin reminded me about it on Twitter. First time ever, I didn’t wait until the last minute to start thinking about my annual contributions. Instead, I took a little time to learn about how this works — and now I’ll keep my contributions in a spreadsheet and then upload them right before…

The survey contains 32 questions and should take less than 10 minutes to complete. Update: The survey is now closed, thanks folks! When I began working with databases, nobody talked about DevOps. It was a few years before I heard the words ‘Agile’ and ‘Extreme Programming’, (which I still read as “EXTREEEEEEMMMMME programmin!”). A lot has changed since then. But a lot hasn’t changed as well. Please help us track the history of how we work with databases by taking the Redgate State of Database DevOps survey today. I believe it’s helpful to our whole community to participate in this survey, and this post explains a few reasons why. The survey… Is hosted by SurveyMonkey, no login is requiredTakes around 10 minutesAllows you to remain anonymous OR provide contact info to get a chance at winning a $250 Amazon gift cardIs for everyone who works with databases, regardless of whether you use…

There was a time when I saw PowerPoint as a necessary evil – a way of conveying ideas that I wasn’t crazy about, but which worked. These days, my perspective has changed quite a bit. I’ve become a PowerPoint fan for a couple of reasons. First, I’m more proficient with PowerPoint, so I can put together presentations quickly and my slides carry greater impact. Also, the PowerPoint team has added features that I believe help me deliver presentations more effectively. This describes one of those features: the new ‘Zoom’ functionality. ‘Zoom’ is about dynamic presentations (rather than ‘zooming in’) I think it’s incredibly important to give your audience context for where you are in a presentation — especially in a talk longer than 5 minutes. I like to give folks an outline of the narrative at the beginning of the talk in the agenda. While I’m going through the material,…

Click the image to register for the webcast There has never been a better time to start a project to champion data privacy In a recent Harris poll sponsored by the payment company Stripe, over 1,000 C-level executives were asked to rate which factors they feel are most threatening to their business. The #1 item that executives rated as “somewhat” or “very” threatening to the success of their business is security / data breaches. The #2 rated threat to these businesses? Increased regulation. Data masking mitigates these top threats One of my very first jobs when I began in IT was to build out environments for developer and test teams at a software development company. At first, we didn’t mask any of this data. After problems arose, we began masking only a single field. That was a huge mistake. In this upcoming free webcast, I’ll share the following in just 30…